Opening this Friday in limited release across the U.S. is Chris Morris's FOUR LIONS, a brutally funny caper comedy about a group of London-based Islamists bumbling their way toward martyrdom. Like DUCK SOUP or DR. STRANGELOVE: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB, Morris's film delights in lampooning the misguided righteousness (and outright stupidity) that often drives humankind to armed conflict; unlike those movies, it unnerves viewers by attempting to empathize with its fools. Had Morris simply gone the smart-but-zany Monty Python route with FOUR LIONS, the film would've probably caused more of a stir than it has. But by choosing to draw his characters as recognizably flawed people instead of punch lines, Morris forces the audience to consider the circumstances that might compel an otherwise rational human being to give up their life - while taking the lives of others - for a religious cause. These guys aren't all brainwashed monsters drooling over their afterlife allotment of seventy-two virgins; some of them are decent family men who've committed to what they believe is a higher - if not the highest - calling. Feel free to refute this as lazy leftist thinking, but, as Morris explains in the below interview, he's done the research; he's sat in on the trials of thwarted jihadis, and read countless books on the subject. These guys are not, by and large, ferociously dedicated ideologues. They're kind of flighty, actually. In the days and months leading up to zero hour, terrorists are just as preoccupied with idle celebrity gossip and marital issues as everyone else (they probably have a favorite Housewife of New Jersey). Most importantly, these guys are far more likely to fail than succeed; in fact, it was the botched assault on the Yemen-stationed USS The Sullivans in 2000 that inspired Morris to begin developing FOUR LIONS. For nearly two decades, Morris has taken dead satirical aim at every taboo known to man; if you're new to his work, a) I envy you, and b) I'd recommend going chronologically from ON THE HOUR to THE DAY TODAY to BRASS EYE - by which point you should be completely hooked (and ready for JAM). But please don't let your lack of familiarity keep you from FOUR LIONS, which opens this Friday, November 5th in limited release (go to Drafthouse Films' website to find out if it's playing near you). Morris's directorial debut is one of the year's best (and funniest!) movies regardless of how well you know his prior endeavors. When one interviews Chris Morris, it is evidently obligatory for the journalist to note that the British humorist is "reclusive", "press shy" and/or "mercurial". So here is my interview with the reclusive, press shy, mercurial, warm and tremendously insightful Chris Morris.
Mr. Beaks: I've been waiting for someone to come at terrorism without complete solemnity. Speaking as an American, it seems verboten to approach this subject with even a dark-comedic sensibility.
Chris Morris: Why should that be? I really don't understand. Particularly since on my tiny sample - i.e. Sundance, South By Southwest and a screening in New York I attended a couple of weeks ago - it's not that people aren't prepared to get it. So why the reticence in coming forward? You'd have thought that having received what one might describe at least as a slap nine years ago that there would be people more than willing to come forward and change the record.
Beaks: I would think so, too. We were willing to do that decades and decades ago when Ernst Lubitsch made TO BE OR NOT TO BE in the midst of World War II. He made a very funny comedy about Nazis - with Jack Benny, of all people. I think Americans had become so complacent before 9/11 that it was a shock to the system when it happened. And now there's a great deal of political correctness about it.
Morris: That's weird, though, isn't it? You could easily understand the right, or at least the center-right, having a position that is sort of irreverent with it. SOUTH PARK is an exception, but they play it in a cartoon vein, so it often gets overlooked. But that kind of thinking... that Mark Twain kind of tradition. (Pause) Glenn Beck! I'd like to see Glenn Beck running around the studio dressed as an airliner!
Beaks: I would like to see that, too. That would be fantastic.
Morris: It's so close! Surely, to see him strapping on some white wings and putting a nose cone on his face and charging around. It's got to be done!
Beaks: Why was this your first feature? What made this the logical first feature project for you?
Morris: I don't tend to think about things that way. People had been saying to me for years, "When are you going to make a film?" I just thought, "Well, when there's a film to be made." Thoughts pop into your head, and they have a rough shape; you know what they are in terms of what they're intended to be. When this came up, it was pretty clear pretty quickly that it at the very least had to be a three-act structure piece. And then it's kind of like, "Well, is that going to be on TV or on film?" That's the only question. You know the length - it's approximately ninety minutes - and you know the rough shape. It just clearly wasn't going to be a sketch, a sitcom, a song or a novella. I think it just had the right shape for a film - whatever shape that is.
Beaks: You've talked about the inspiration being the Yemeni Millennium bombers, and how their boat sinking was a sort of Keystone Kops moment. Once you had that idea, did you then have to think about tone?
Morris: I use that example because that's the first one I specifically remember as announcing the possibility of this project. But it didn't do it completely; it just announced the possibility of it. There had to be a cluster of examples before you got a pattern. By that point, a range of different tones of humor suggested themselves, from a reaction shot in a Keystone Cops film to the basic, nitty gritty of people getting on and not getting on in a tight-knit group - and, I suppose, the kind of humor of undermining the status of previously, immaculately iconic bad guys. Once you have that as a sort of early kind of role, things just start sticking to it. The Keystone Kops thing, for example... I attended a court case that lasted eight months, which was basically seven guys who'd gotten 600 kilos of fertilizer. They'd gone to a training camp to learn how to turn it into a bomb. Then they'd come back, and they'd forgotten how to make it into a bomb. But they still wanted to make it into a bomb, so they started making calls back to Pakistan saying, "Yeah, you told me how to make a bomb, but I've forgotten. Could you remind me?" At which point the people in Pakistan were like, "Are you joking? There's probably only half the world's security services listening to this line!" They'd got themselves a top-notch MI5 surveillance into the bargain. What struck me is that this was referred to in court by the significant posse of policemen who were always there, and the twenty odd journalists who came in every day, [as] "Keystone Kops". They talked about it. They literally said, "This is like Keystone Kops what these guys are up to." And yet when it was reported in the papers, it was back to the serious narrative: these guys were going to bring down ten airliners. I mean, they weren't going to bring down ten airliners. They momentarily had a fantasy that it would be a great thing to do, but there was as much chance of that as them building a moon rocket. So there was a lot of laughter that wasn't getting outside, and that really seemed, in fully three dimensions, to suggest the basis for this film.
Beaks: And that's because, for the newspapers and the networks, fear keeps people reading and watching. If these guys seem kind of innocuous, they'll have a laugh and turn away, I guess, right?
Morris: It is partly that. But once you're reporting for a newspaper, you've got a preset condition. It's actually to do with people not thinking at all; it's just to do with "This is the shape of a modern terrorism story." You instinctively sideline the farce; you sideline the fact that even when these guys bought the fertilizer... the guy who sold the fertilizer to them said, "Right. This is for your allotment, okay? Is your allotment as big as three football pitches? Because that's how much fertilizer you've got there." And the guy buying it said, "Yeah. Yeah, it's about that big." These really stupid conversations that are not there in the newspaper report because 1) it's pushed for space, it's probably going to be 200 - 300 words on the average day of the court roundup, and 2) they're going for the things that fit the narrative anyway. If they mention airliners or blowing up some slags in a nightclub, that's the bit that's going to get in - rather than the bit where the one white guy in the group pretended to be from MI5 in order to persuade the parents of one of the brown guys that they should let him go to Pakistan. Literally. You've got an MI5 recording of this happening in real time audio. They say, "Right. There's my mom's house. You go down the road there, you pretend you're from MI5, and you say it's important to go to Pakistan as a matter of national security. My parents are loyal Brits. They will buy that. They will buy the authority of MI5." Duly, this guy goes and does exactly that, and comes back to the car ten minutes later and goes, "Yes! High five, brother! I've done it! I've fooled your parents! They're going to let you go!" And indeed they do. I'd love to see that report in the papers, but there's not the queue for it at the moment.
Beaks: That's unfortunate.
Morris: But it's getting there, isn't it? It's getting there. Somebody was trying to bring down a plane and set fire to his underpants. He looks pretty damn silly. And there was a guy in Indonesia the other day: he was a suicide bomber on his way to bomb an army compound. He was on his bicycle, swerved to avoid a pothole, hit a lamppost and blew up. I mean, these kinds of incidents are pretty stupid. (Laughs)
Beaks: (Laughing) They are. But when they get reported in the United States, if there were any American citizens that could've been hurt, that fact gets used like a shillelagh to beat over the head of Obama or whomever is believed to have been negligent in allowing this to almost happen.
Morris: They weren't looking. Yes. (Pause) I'm sure you're right in that there's always a political angle on any story, but I do genuinely think that almost anyone in the American political spectrum is capable of going, "Hang on a second. These guys really are ridiculous." I don't think it's without American consciousness to do that. I just suspect that it's what the needs of the day are. The Republicans are on the rise, and the Democrats are going to get a bashing; the referee is going to blow his whistle on Obama's presidency so far. You've got all those presets surrounding any story that comes in today. That will determine how it goes. Similarly, if you're fighting in Iraq... after all, Fox News ran a program called "The Cost of Freedom"; I think they still do. So everything is determined by a preset of policy. But I think, equally, on any day, any one of those pundits or talk show hosts could just suddenly say, "You know what, these people are ridiculous." It wouldn't have to be Howard Stern. It could be Rush Limbaugh. It could be anybody. As I said, it could be Glenn Beck strapping on wings. I don't know, It seems to me it's there, and I don't think anybody could violently disagree with that. Am I wrong?
Beaks: I don't think you're wrong. It's just that someone's got to be the first to do it, and I think that's a frightening place to be. Because if you do it and you draw silence or outrage, then your career is mucked up a bit.
Morris: (Laughs) True. Yeah. Sean Hannity goes full on for the jihadi comedy effect, and tumbleweeds blow across the studio, and his ratings go to zero. I don't think that would happen, but I see what you mean. Breaking ranks. But that's the job for these guys, right? They're all professional rank-breakers! They're all radicals!
Beaks: Did you always plan for your characters to push as far with their plan as they do in the finished film?
Morris: Yeah. I really didn't want to take the very worst examples - guys trying to set fire to their feet or letting off bombs in their underpants - and try and let those speak for everything that is happening. That would be dishonest. Everything in the film is drawn from a real life observation of some kind. We've made everything up, but we've made it up on the basis of what real life had dished up and shown could happen. So I wanted to have a medium-impact event. The guys in the 9/11 attack behaved farcical behavior in their build-up. There's a very good book by Terry McDermott [PERFECT SOLDIERS: THE 9/11 HIJACKERS: WHO THEY WERE, WHY THEY DID IT], which details sort of eyewitness accounts of various people who met the Hamburg cell as they were plotting the 9/11 attacks. And there's another book written by [Yosri Fouda and Nick Fielding] called MASTERMINDS OF TERROR, which talks about the guys who planned the 9/11 attacks. In both cases, you have examples of silly behavior. So it would be wrong to suggest that it's only the rank failures who behave foolishly. It's common. You have examples of klutzy behavior. I wanted to include that, but I didn't want to preclude the fact that they could actually get some of the way to enacting their plan - albeit in a totally compromised way.
Beaks: But also, at the center of this, giving us a character like Omar [played by Riz Ahmed], who's somewhat rational and a good father. My favorite scene in this movie is his use of THE LION KING to explain away his failure. It's also a subtle indoctrination. When you're using a story as powerful as THE LION KING with a child... as Omar's son says, "Simba would never give up!" At that point, he's got him.
Morris: Of course. But I think he's actually talking to himself in that scene. Omar is almost seeking his son's advice for what he should do. He's coming back and saying, "Should I tell everyone and risk causing confusion, or should I keep it a secret and tell them everything is cool?" And his son says, through THE LION KING analogy, "Scar's got to be defeated." And Omar goes, "Great." And off he goes. He's almost seeking the pure advice of his son through that membrane. I don't think his son really understands what's going on, but he knows the narrative of good and evil. I came across guys with radical pasts who love THE LION KING for precisely that: they're caught up in a good-and-evil narrative. It just so happens that they're on the other side of it, and they see the people they're fighting as Scar. It doesn't stop them from being, as you say, a "good dad". I mean, it's the sort of over-repeated cliche that bin Laden is impeccably polite. Now, I would put that as a lower moral rating than being a good dad - albeit, we've just shown [Omar] as a cinematic good dad. I think this is part of what's interesting about what's going on; you might say "frightening", but I think it needs to be dealt with. I think these people can be good dads. It just depends on which side of the fence you are. They're not mean to their own. A soldier who's going out to fight anywhere in the world might have a moment like that with their son. We don't even think about it. When I was a kid growing up, we ran around fighting the Germans, being Spitfires and Hurricanes shooting down Messerschmitts. When we were five, we didn't even think about it. When you're a child, you're caught up in that kind of narrative. I think it's partly natural. The leader of the bombers who attacked London on July 7th five years ago is actually on a video shot by one of his friends with his nine-month-old daughter on his knee saying to her in 2004, when he thinks he's going off to fight in Afghanistan, "You're the best thing in my life. You and your mom have meant more to me than anything else. I'd love to watch you grow up to learn how to speak, but the thing is, I've got to do what I've got to do. I may not see you again. If I don't, I love you more than anything in the world." You're watching this and thinking, "Wow! This is the good-dad speech from a guy who came back and blew up some people in London." That gives you a difficult equation to [work out] in your head.
